Late Spring, The Broken Pocket Watch

I should have left the watch untouched.

It has rested inside the western cabinet for years without incident, beside the Mourning Locket with Hair Seal and several smaller personal effects recovered from abandoned estates that long ago slipped into the cliffs below the Archive. They are quiet objects, the sort visitors once overlooked entirely while searching for stranger things elsewhere in the collection.

I chose the watch today because it seemed safe. After the bell, I wanted something uncomplicated.

The outer casing had almost completely seized with corrosion, and a fracture along one side exposed part of the movement beneath. Several essential components are simply gone. The gearing is broken, several mounting points stand empty, and the balance wheel is missing altogether. By any ordinary standard the watch should be incapable of running. Every containment report reaches the same conclusion.

Even so, it does.

Intermittently.

I carried it upstairs shortly after breakfast while Clio slept beside the furnace and rain drifted softly against the northern windows. For the first hour the work was exactly what I had hoped it would be. I cleaned away loose corrosion, polished the surviving brass, replaced the worn cloth beneath the restoration tray, and spent some time examining the damaged movement beneath the magnifier. It was slow, familiar work, and for a while I found it reassuring.

Then the watch ticked.

It was only a single, sharp movement, but it was loud enough for me to stop immediately. The second hand advanced by one interval before falling still again. I watched the mechanism for several minutes without touching it, expecting another movement that never came. Eventually I convinced myself that some hidden tension within the damaged works had simply released while I was handling it. Ancient mechanisms have a habit of behaving unpredictably, and there seemed no reason to imagine anything more.

Several minutes later it ticked again.

This time something else happened as well.

For the briefest moment I heard railway wheels rolling across iron tracks hidden somewhere within dense fog. The sound vanished almost as quickly as it appeared, leaving only the rain against the windows and the quiet hiss of the restoration lamp.

When the watch moved a third time the impression lasted longer. I saw lantern light reflected across black water, heard someone speak my name from somewhere beyond the mist, and recognised the stone staircase that has appeared so often in my dreams. The sensation faded almost immediately, but it left me with the uncomfortable certainty that I had not imagined it.

I wrapped the watch in three layers of linen and locked it inside the study cabinet.

Even then I could still hear it ticking faintly through the wood despite the mechanism remaining visibly incomplete.

The containment records describe similar incidents. Nearby clocks losing time without explanation. Incorrect timestamps appearing throughout Archive catalogues. Witnesses hearing sounds from places that no longer exist. One preservation note mentions railway signals being heard near containment during inactive observation hours despite there being no functioning railway anywhere within the surrounding district.

The abandoned station from which the watch was recovered was eventually demolished after nearly twenty years of reports involving missing time, impossible arrivals, and trains that no official timetable acknowledged.

I understand now why the Archive accepted it so readily.

Clio woke the moment I locked the cabinet. She was not frightened, only intensely alert. What disturbed me was that she never looked towards the drawer itself. Instead she watched the empty space beside it with unwavering attention, as though something else had entered the room unnoticed.

Muninn appeared less than a minute later carrying a small piece of corroded metal in his claws. He dropped it onto the restoration tray before disappearing into the upper halls without making a sound.

It was a watch hand, blackened with age and considerably older than the movement inside the pocket watch.

Naturally, I examined the mechanism again.

The original hand remains exactly where it should be. Nothing has been displaced, nothing is missing, and yet the loose hand Muninn delivered matches it perfectly. I have compared the dimensions several times and can find no meaningful difference between them beyond their apparent age.

I have no explanation for that.

Tonight the watch continues to tick from inside the study cabinet, though not regularly. The pauses between each movement have become almost rhythmic. At one point I caught myself thinking they sounded like breathing before realising how absurd the comparison was. Even so, the thought has been difficult to dismiss.

Several corridor clocks throughout the upper halls stopped entirely shortly after sunset. One now loses several minutes every hour despite being reset repeatedly, so I eventually removed it from the wall and placed it in the northern storage room. The adjustment accomplished very little. Every so often I still think I hear it ticking quietly through the closed door.

There is another sound as well.

Very faintly, beneath the ticking, I occasionally catch what resembles the distant whistle of a train arriving long before anyone should have expected it.

For now I have returned the watch to containment.

I suspect it would prefer otherwise.

— M